It started yesterday, the white puffs flurrying down like feathers from medieval angels molting from the stratosphere.  It was not much but enough to make my foothold on the icy ground a bit shaky while I carried the potted plants from my classroom after my last class session.  The school shuts off the radiator on the last day of the semester until the spring semester opens.  That’s eight weeks in the cold that even the sturdy spider plants could not possibly endure.

I carried my plants in one of those oversized shopping bags that boutiques like to provide.  I live only about four blocks from my classroom so I did not bother to bring plastic or towel to cover the plants.  But after fifteen minutes outside in between warm rooms, the plants resembled weeklong leeks in the fridge, or newly harvested kelp from the icy waters, all desperately crying out to be cooked and consumed, or be thrown away.  After two more trips, half of my study/living room now looks like a solarium of the Chicago botanical garden.

This dusting-off exercise in our mind is not, however, our wilting in the Dong Bei cold, a consequence of retirement from the formal teaching service.  Rather, it rehearses my markings and turning points of the past year.   

I am a historical figure, by upbringing and choice.  I love history – the facts-based reminiscing of the past so that the future does not come as too much of a scare nor a surprise.  I no longer live the present with fear of the unknown, cowed and resigned; history gives me the confidence to live each day like it was the only day of the rest of my life!  At every moment, I encounter the past, present, and the future, all at once!

But my gray matter is accustomed to the rhythm of a 365-day trip of the planet around the sun so I dance with the crowd in Gregorian patterns and come now to the completion of another Gaia revolution around Sol.

I made two trips to Honolulu this year to visit 93-year old mother diagnosed to be frail of bones to require 24/7 attention at a medical facility.  My fealty was made more intense by her mothering smile even in the midst of her frailty.  She reminded me of the longevity that is programmed in my genes that I abused with tar and nicotine in my youthful lungs, so I am prudent in my life’s covenant.  I lopped off almost a decade from my statistical staying power.

This year, I lived too much at the edge of hoping against hope, and adjusted my radar accordingly.  Wayward was a word applied to describe personal fidelity in relationships (playful is my term), and though my monastic mendicare these past years understood that being solitary is not a lonely journey, I pined too much for a certain company though much more in the romance of the imagination rather than in the plane of earthy reality.  I have since distanced myself from the cuff and cusp of illusion.

Aging got dramatically demonstrated as the jowl of a second chin and the sag of a previously firm and rounded heine became more pronounced.  I experienced loss of breath while navigating four flights to my classroom.  It had become a federal effort to reach down and sock my feet warm in the cold.  My hair now blooms like Jack Nickolson's electrified mane on a bad hair day!

My residence does have an elevator, which thankfully assists my knees.  I live on the eleventh floor, but some of my students reside in dorms that are above ten floors without elevators. Just imagining how they strive up and down the stairs daily exhausts my faculties.  So this year, I shifted to the last scheduled 17-year retirement phase of my life’s odyssey.  I no longer protest when a young thing offers me her seat on the bus!

The University delivered the coup d'grace when it decided to no longer hire teachers over 65 years old.  Approaching the sunset of my years, I signed loan papers on a dwelling with my host family; I get the use of a room on a first floor three-bedroom apartment near the University, at a fifth of cost.  This will be home base to treks to Irkutsk and Tashkent in the next few years.  Friends and family can also visit me should they travel to my northeast corner of China.

As the snow flurries drifted down this morning on my way to my last day in class, I ran into one of the grounds’ maintenance men sweeping the snow off one of the walkways.  Equipped with dried twigs attached to a pole, a homemade broom, he thoroughly swept the white cover off the red-bricked pathway. 

I stopped to catch his attention, looked him in the eyes, and said ‘thank you’ in the only Zhongwen I can decently pronounce.  He was surprised that I would bother, and recognizing me as the foreign teacher who does not speak the language, he broke into a toothless but winsome smile.   

I turned around and before entering the building, took a deep breath, cast a broad look around me including another glance on the bent but proud worker, and to no one in particular, uttered, xie xie!  For his life and mine this past year, I wrapped it up in Peace!  Equanimity and tranquility to all.

As all moving forward entails, one often engages in the activity of deconstruction to clear the debris from previous engagements.  So we do so on this sunny day off Kowloon Bay in the now Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, called Xianggang in Mandarin, and Hoeng Gong Zai in Cantonese.

We are bit early for a 50th year anniversary of an August landing in Kowloon in 1965.  I just turned 20 when I waved my mother goodbye while she stood on Manila South Harbor's wharf while I sailed out on board SS President Wilson for a 20-day journey to San Francisco across the Pacific, on to a three-year theology stint in Kentucky.  Kowloon was first stop and my first viewing of Sinoland, then we overnighted in famed Yokohama lights that offered a rail trip to Ginza.  A few waves later, we got lei'd without getting Maui'd in Honolulu, and a few foghorns later, I rose early at dawn to weather the bay's morning mist for a view of the Golden Gate bridge.

HK's Victoria Peak then was shrouded on low-lying clouds while Kowloon teamed with coolies pulling their rickshaws, the living embodiment of many Hollywood views.  I can now add Susie Wong of Wan chai but at the time, our prurient interest was not whetted yet.  We just barely crossed over from the terrain of innocence, if not the blissful world of ignorance.

But yesterday is best left to John Lennon's lyrics.  Tomorrow is where I focus my gaze.  A colleague from Canada decided to do a couple of touring days in HK headed for Pea Eye.  I am the designated guide.  I was forthright about HK's tongue primarily Cantonese (not that I have any Mandarin comprehension to brag about) but I am the local security blanket and I am only too willing to play the role.

I booked a leisurely 36-hour train ride from Shenyang earlier before retirement was hurriedly announced so I reluctantly cancelled after shifting quickly to the hassle mode. My colleague would not take "no" for an answer.  A plane ticket showed up in my email so now I am basking on Kowloon's sunshine for a couple of days.

We will skip the seat with the view on famed double-decker buses.  World class city HK is no different from London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo and New York.  It is the Year-that-Will-Be of 2014 that grabs my attention and pulls my mind before I watch the night's fireworks holding a mai tai listening to the twitter of Ilonggo and Iloko sounds.  My tourist was Davao raised.

The awe and wonder about tomorrow (that's my next 17 years) is its openness.  One is free to decide to give it form and shape without feeling determined by the lingering luggage of the past.  Given our sudden transition state, this reality has gotten more stark than usual.  I am in fact wobbly on the dance floor of transparent nothingness sans the familiar lingering steam of choices previously made.  I used the term tabula rasa before but I did not fully understand its existential meaning until now.

There is the matter of economic tyranny of which retirement is supposed to be salve, a balsam and a balm, an appeasing cream and lotion.  We know of but do not share the anxiety of its anticipation nor the despair that characterizes its uncertainties; I just hunker down to chart a new course in the direction of an unknown but unsurprisingly welcoming future.

I cosigned a hefty bank loan back in Shenyang to pay for a dwelling under construction scheduled to be turned over in June/July and to be habitable for October occupancy.  Many friends quake with regrets over the limits imposed by similar situations.  I explore its possibilities.  That is what's so inviting about tomorrow.

Having been Atlantic, Gulf, Pacific, and midland prairie focused in the last 50-years, I now bellow "westward ho" from China's northeast, like the way American wagon train pioneers used to holler.  There is that inviting boat ride from Dalian via NoKor Chongjin port to Vladivostok, then traverse on a trans Siberian train ride through the Far East's khrebets via Mongolian Ulan Ude and interracial Irkutsk onward to Europe's Moscow and St. Petersburg before grabbing a 15-30 day Euro pass from Scandinavia to south inland heading Turkey and Greece, across the southern shores of the Mediterranean back up north of Atlantic coast EU that can easily terminate in the British Isles, spending a day or two at each stop.   Or, the trek to Kasgar and Tashkent!  The good thing about dreaming is that it is free, and one can always change one's mind!

How to pay for the gig?  Yo, you still in that rot!

Many are stuck in their recriminations against the past and fearful acquiescence to the fashionable modes of the future, manipulated and promoted by the guys and dolls who inhabit the penthouses of HK's skyline and their cousins in other world cities.  We shall refrain from sashaying to their tune!

For now, it is the din of nitrate bangers (HK-banned but tell that to the Chinese) initially meant to tame wild dragons (the Chiang Jiang/Yangtze and the Huanghe/Yellow mighty rivers are depicted as dragons) that will accompany our vigil tonight.  My guest brought a familiar Glenfiddich of the Scottish highland.  Two downs from a three-finger tumbler will do me just right.  Happy New Year!